1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information input and output method using a dot pattern for inputting and outputting various information and programs by optically reading the dot pattern information formed on a printed material or the like, and particularly, the present invention relates to a technology whereby a direction of a block configured by a dot can be determined.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, an information output method for outputting the information such as voice by reading a bar code formed on a printed material or the like has been suggested. For example, a method for storing the information equivalent to the given key information in a storing means in advance, retrieving this information from keys read by a bar code reader, and outputting it has been suggested. In addition, a technology to form a dot pattern that minute dots are arranged in a predetermined rule so that much information and many programs can be outputted, fetch the dot pattern printed on the printed material or the like by a camera as the image data, digitalize it, and output the voice information has been also suggested.
However, the conventional method for outputting the voice or the like by the bar code has a problem such that the bar code printed on the printed material or the like is obtrusive. In addition, the bar code is large and it occupies a part of a page space, so that this method has a problem such that it is not possible to allocate many bar codes in an easy understood manner to each of apart of writing or sentence, or a photograph, a picture, a character having a meaning in an image of a graphic, and an object from a point of view lay out.
Therefore, as shown in the following patent documents, the inventor(s) of the present invention has suggested fully new dot patterns capable of storing much data without influences on a print side.
[Patent Document 1] WO/2004/084125
[Patent Document 2] PCT/JP2004/019427
In these related arts by the inventor(s) (namely, patent documents 1 and 2), the inventor suggests that a key dot is provided and a direction of the data (a direction of a block) and an area of a block are defined. Since the direction of the block can be grasped in this manner, the information defined by the block can be given a different meaning for each direction. Therefore, it can be said that the inventor(s) of the present invention suggests an original dot pattern which can store various information.
However, according to the technology of defining the direction of the block by this key dot, the information dot cannot be arranged at a place where the key dot is arranged, so that the information amount of the block is limited and an algorithm for searching for the key dot gets complex to require a long calculation time, and the focused amount of the ambient area of the key dot is large. This leads to a problem to be solved such that a resolution of a frame buffer is also required, which is newly pointed out by the inventor(s) of the present invention.